Measurement 2.0

When I say measurement 2.0 I’m not just thinking of measuring the effectiveness of social media marketing. That’s great and important, but I’m thinking bigger. Technology in general and open-source collaborative technology, in particular, is making life easier. How can we use technology to make our lives easier?

For years experimental research was done by professors on unsuspecting undergraduates. No longer. We all know about the college kid with a computer who revolutionized the way we use the web… now meet the college kid with a computer who built a business around the research collected during a class project. His sample of 7,000 students and 235 employers would have taken years and an entire research team just a few years ago.

This change is important to recognize. By 2011, 80% of active internet users will have a second life in a virtual world. With Google sites, anyone that knows how to click a mouse can make a webpage. With SurveyMonkey anyone can create a survey. And this is just the beginning. The other day I had a dream that Google came up with a new, free app that did content analysis. Soon enough, soon enough…

Consider the possibilities in our future:

And of course, there will be both positive and negative implications. Easy knowledge sharing means faster implementation but a small barrier to entry will lower standards (ahem, Wikipedia).